The monthly price you see on a pricing page is rarely the price you end up paying. Two charges arrive later, the overage once you pass your order quota, and a forced upgrade when the feature you want turns out to sit on a higher plan.
A Shopify loyalty program costs between $12 and $1999 a month depending on your order volume.
This article breaks the cost into its three parts, with figures from each app's own pricing page, then works through what a full year costs a growing store.
Your bill comes from the subscription, the overage rate, and the plan you're pushed onto to reach a feature.
The subscription is the published monthly price, and it buys a set number of orders per month. Overage is what you pay per 100 orders once you pass that number. The third charge has no line item: you wanted VIP tiers or checkout redemption, that feature sat two plans up, and you paid the difference to reach it.
Merchants only consider the first one and miss the other two, which is why a program that looked like $79 a month ends up at $199.
Subscription prices climb with order volume, and the gap between apps widens as you grow.
Love Loyalty's $399/mo offers unlimited orders, which is why the figure repeats at 15,000 and 25,000 orders. Growave removes the cap at $999/mo.
LoyaltyLion publishes a $199/mo starting point and quotes everything above it. Yotpo publishes $199/mo and quotes its two higher tiers. A merchant at 5,000 orders can't price either without booking a call, which costs time even when it doesn't cost money.
Overage costs $5 to $20 per 100 orders past your quota, and it stops being worth paying once the next plan up costs less than the overage itself.
That ceiling arrives sooner than most merchants expect. Growave charges $20 per 100 orders past its 500-order plan at $15/mo, so by around 1,400 orders you're better off on the $199 plan covering 1,500. Love Loyalty charges $15 per 100 past its 2,000-order plan at $79/mo, which stays cheaper than the flat $399 plan until roughly 4,100 orders. Joy charges $10 per 100 past 2,000 at $129/mo, cheaper than its $499 plan until about 5,700 orders. LoyaltyLion charges $10 per 100.
Smile.io is the exception, because the plan above $199 costs $999 and bills annually. A store doing 5,000 orders pays $199 plus $500 in overage rather than committing to $999 for a year, so overage there can run well past the subscription and still be the cheaper choice.
Read the overage rate as a countdown to your next plan rather than as a running charge. What it really tells you is how few extra orders it takes before you're paying the higher price.
The plan you need is set by the feature you want, not by your order count, and this is where most merchants pay more than they planned.
The feature you want sets your plan more often than your order count does, and this is where most merchants pay more than they planned.
A store doing 800 orders a month sits comfortably inside a $15 plan on order volume alone. Add VIP tiers to the requirements and that same store pays $199 on four of the six apps here, because tiers don't appear below that price. Nothing about the store changed. One feature moved it up two plans.
So price the feature list, not the order count. The section below gives the cheapest price each feature is available at.
Each figure below is the lowest published monthly price that includes the feature, on any plan.
Points, referrals, and Shopify POS cost the least to reach, at $12 to $15 on four of the six apps. LoyaltyLion and Yotpo both start at $199, so their entry price is more than ten times Love Loyalty's for the same three features.
VIP tiers and paid memberships are where the spread opens. Love Loyalty includes both at $79/mo and Joy includes both at $129/mo. Neither feature is listed on Smile.io, Growave, LoyaltyLion, or Yotpo's published plan comparisons for memberships, and tiers cost $199 or a quote everywhere else.
Redeeming points at checkout is the hardest feature to price, because three apps require Shopify Plus as well as their top plan. LoyaltyLion lists it as Shopify Plus only on every tier, so a non-Plus merchant can't buy it at any price. Love Loyalty's cart redemption from $12/mo covers most of the same job without the Shopify Plus requirement.
Annual cost depends more on your peak month than your average month.
Take a store averaging 1,500 orders a month that does 5,000 in November.
The spread across a year is wider than the spread on any single month, and it comes from the quota you're given at each price rather than from the headline number.
Price the plan against your busiest month, not your average one.
Check the quota alongside the price. A cheap plan with a small quota moves you onto the next plan sooner than the price suggests, and the plan you end up on is the one worth comparing.
List the features you need before you compare prices. If VIP tiers, bonus campaigns, or checkout redemption are on your list, the cheapest plan that covers your order volume is probably not the plan you'll be on.
Look at flat pricing if your volume swings. Love Loyalty at $399/mo and Growave at $999/mo both remove the order cap, so a spike month costs the same as a quiet one.
Get quotes early if you're considering LoyaltyLion or Yotpo. Neither publishes a price above its entry tier, and a call plus contract takes time you won't have in late October.
The orders included at each price, and the price of the plan carrying the features you want, set your annual cost between them. Compare those two and the headline monthly figure stops mattering.
On both, Love Loyalty comes in lowest of the apps compared here. It includes 2,000 orders and VIP tiers at $79/mo, and charges a flat $399 with no order cap above that, so a 15,000-order month and a 25,000-order month cost the same.
Want to work out what a program would cost at your order volume? Book a demo with our founder.
Several apps offer free plans with order limits, usually a few hundred orders a month. Free plans typically exclude VIP tiers and bonus campaigns, so most stores that run a program seriously move to a paid plan within a year.
Every app here prices on monthly orders, not customer count. Agradi migrated over a million customers to Love Loyalty and pays on order volume, not on the size of its list.
Find the cheapest plan that both covers your busiest month and includes the features you want. Those two conditions together, rather than the lowest advertised price, decide what you pay.
You do if your plan has an order cap. November volume runs well above a typical month, so you either pay overage on every order past your quota or move up a plan for the month, whichever costs less. Flat-rate plans with no cap charge the same in November as in February.
LoyaltyLion and Yotpo quote their higher tiers on request. Both publish a $199/mo starting point, and the features many merchants want sit above it.
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